3.2.1 Information work and information workers Focusing on information’s importance to people in their working lives
leads us to emphasise the growing number and importance of the jobs
and roles that rely on an advanced ability to use information. People who
do such jobs and have such roles are often referred to as knowledge workers(sometimes contrasted with ‘data workers’).
Activity Review the definition of knowledge work found in Laudon and Laudon (2013), Chapter
11. Review the kinds of tasks that knowledge workers perform in organisations, and the
skills they bring to bear.
For example, an architect, a fashion designer, a doctor or a civil engineer,
are all jobs that demand that people who do them have very specific skills
– their specific and distinctive knowledge. This will include an ability
to access information and to use it to achieve some understanding of a
situation and then make appropriate decisions, be it a diagnosis, a drawing
or plan, a design or specification – be it of a summer dress or of a concrete
beam.
All these knowledge workers, in today’s world, probably do some or even
most of their work using computers and specialised software designed
for their kinds of tasks. They will also usually work in teams and so
information will be exchanged among their peers by technical means
– sending an email, posting on a website, updating a blog or tweeting.
Sometimes we talk about knowledge workers sharing their expertise
through a ‘knowledge base’, which may be a specific type of database
system focused on storing knowledge, insights or case experience. Thus a
lawyer may access a knowledge base using an online database of laws and
specific legal judgments; an engineer may search in a database of previous
designs to find an example of a solution to a particular problem. In each
case knowledge is being stored and then accessed.
